Pedaling Pinnacle

LITTLE ROCK — Pinnacle Mountain State Park has had a mountain bike problem for years.

Cyclists keep risking their necks trying to pedal its rocky hiking trails.

But thanks to three industrious bikers with good contacts at Arkansas State Parks and no fear of chiggers, Little Rock’s heavily visited state park can now direct daredevils to more than eight miles of bike-friendly single-track.

For the first time, it’s OK to bike Pinnacle - “anywhere with the exception of the walking trails,” says park Superintendent Ron Salley.

Which are the walking trails?

“That would be the Kingfisher Trail, the East Summit, the West Summit, the Base Trail, the Ouachita Trail, the Rocky Valley Trail and the East Quarry Overlook. And the Arboretum,” Salley says.

In other words, all the park trails are still off limits to biking, except the new seven-tenths-of-a-mile Rabbit Ridge Mountain Bike Trail and the 7.4-mile Jackfork Mountain Bike Trail.

Neither is anywhere near the park’s popular mountain and its day-use picnic area.

Both trails are set in hilly woods along the access road that leads from Pinnacle Valley Road to the park Visitor Center. Google Maps calls this road “Pinnacle Valley State Park Road” but park personnel call it “the road to the Visitor Center.”

Do you know about the Visitor Center? Park employees are convinced most visitors go straight to the picnic playground and have no idea this center even exists.

Rabbit Ridge Mountain Bike Trail is on the left on the Visitor Center road after you turn off Pinnacle Valley Road.

The trailhead is carpeted with shale gravel and has vaguely defined parking near a storage shed that used to be a pump house.

The Jackfork trailhead is farther up the hill on the right, below the Visitor Center and directly across from the trailhead of the hiking-only Ouachita Trail: The Carl Hunter memorial wildflower garden splits this well-defined parking area between the two trail openings.

WHO DID IT?

Credit for the new paths belongs “primarily to Joe Jacobs and his friend Daron Harris,” Salley says. “He did bring in a few people from some of the bike shops, but Joe came up with the concept, talked to the parks planning and development, and our director, got approval for it and came out just about every day for weeks, months, getting it marked and cleared.

“The park staff is helping out as far as trailheads, but he and Daron have done 95 percent of the work.”

Jacobs works for state parks as manager of revenue and marketing, but “I’m not doing this as part of my job,” he says. “This is all volunteer.”

He also volunteered his wife, Lisa Mullis, as well as Harris, an architectural engineer who has years of experience with trail construction on bike paths, including those at Camp Robinson and the Syllamo Trail. Harris jokes that he used to be Jacobs’ good friend.

The trio followed construction principles taught by the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA). Harris says they were determined to make a “mountain bike trail made for mountain bikers” - who really only notice the two inches of tread under their tires and whether their handlebars will fit between trees.

In other words, they wanted to create single track. So they chose not to refit the park’s old Forest Service roads or jeep traces. They didn’t use excavation machines, although a backhoe helped finish the Jackfork trailhead.

“It’s all hand-built,” Harris says.

In other words, they stopped having lives.

“This has all been Saturdays, and evenings after work, Sundays,” Mullis says.

“Six a.m. to whenever we feel it’s time for lunch,” Harris says.

Much of the Jackfork Trail is close to the Visitor Center access road, so although they had to haul in the lumber that was donated to build seven bridges, they didn’t suffer all that much. They precut two-by-fours for treads - 48 planks for one 18-foot bridge with ramps - and conveyed them by cramming eight or nine at a time into backcountry backpacks.

After sweating in the woods, they felt too smelly for restaurants or even, after a while, the deli counter at Fresh Market. So they’d just go home.

“We’ve been out here for two years,” Jacobs says. But they didn’t begin reporting their hours to park volunteer coordinator Abby Cress until they began raking the forest floor in February. She estimates they’ve given about 700 hours.

NO BUNNIES!

Naming the new paths took almost as long as building them, Jacobs says.

For instance, originally, they called the beginner loop “the Bunny Trail,” and not only because that’s the term for easy routes in snow skiing. “When we went out and laid it out on GPS, it looked like the Energizer Bunny,” he says - the global positioning system coordinates he plotted on a map suggested rabbit ears.

But the naming of state park trails isn’t done so lightly. “We want to try to stick to nature and try to inform and educate people as to what wildlife is in this area,” Salley explains.

He and State Parks Director Greg Butts thought “Bunny Trail” was “a little too Disney,” Jacobs says.

“Jackrabbit” was also out, because there are no jackrabbits in central Arkansas or most of the state. (Only a few black-tailed jackrabbits have been reported in western Arkansas.)

The easy path winds across a low ridge, so “we decided to mature it a little and call it Rabbit Ridge,” Salley says.

And “jackfork is a geologic term,” he adds. “It’s named for a type of rock found in this area, on this range, the Fulk Mountains.”

The Jackfork Sandstone formation contains different colors of shales and sandstones, sedimentary rocks laid down by a once-upon a-time deep ocean before everything rose up, folded, cracked, eroded.

Visitors won’t learn the many other, more colorful nicknames the builders gave to stones and whatnot as they went. For example, “Jake’s Bridge” re-purposes wood from the backyard run of Jacobs’ dog, Jake, after Jake died. And a few sites commemorate litter: “BudweiserRock.”

“Buck Powers Ridge, you come up on this ridge and the creek’s down below. It’s one of my favorite places out here,” Jacobs says. It’s named for an odd little brown bottle that once held something called Buck Powers Dressing for Salad.

“And the bottle is still up there, we set it on the rock.”

GO RIGHT

A steep drop on the most scenic and woodsy part of the Jackfork is nicknamed either “Stairway to Heaven” or “Highway to Hell” depending on whether cyclists ride the trail counterclockwise, or make a mistake and travel clockwise.

“We’re going to put a sign here that says ‘Hard and harder,’” Jacobs says, pointing to a tree that confronts cyclists after they’ve ridden the opening section, a 1.2-mile “stick” that flies more or less downhill from the trailhead. At this T intersection of stick and lollipop, riders have a choice.

“Always go to the right on this trail,” Harris says.

“You have to pedal. It’s not a cruising trail,” he says.

And it’s not a hiking trail, either. The Jackfork is never farther than 1,000 feet from the Visitor Center road.

Which will simplify rescues, Salley notes. “And we are first responders.”

Both of the new trails twist back on themselves like spaghetti. Rabbit Ridge wriggles around on a hillside cleared of underbrush by a controlled burn; and on the Jackfork Trail, the park road is usually shining through the trees and you can eavesdrop on road bikers on Pinnacle Valley Road.

But what matters to cyclists is how the terrain rises, falls and turns under rolling wheels.

Fresh off the Jackfork on a recent Saturday, Cliff Li and Jason Ghidotti loaded their bikes onto their cars near the Carl Hunter garden.

Li, a civil engineer from Maumelle who bikes “two or three times a week,” had just finished his second trip on the trail and pronounced it “excellent.”

“On a scale of one to 10, it would be a 6 or 7. There’s some rocky parts and basically you’re going up and down the whole time. It’s not too technical, but it’s long,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ghidotti, an engineer from Little Rock, had a bloody shin. “Went over the handlebars. I was just getting a little tired and didn’t lift the front wheel enough.”

What level of skill does he think riders need before tackling the Jackfork Trail? “I think they should be fairly skilled,” Ghidotti says.

That’s what the trio of trail-builders intended.

“Unfortunately,” Mullis says, “we’ve spent so much time on this we’re going to have to build back up to be able to ride the trail we’ve built.”

A video of the “Jackfork Mountain Bike Trail” is online at youtube.com.